Florida governor Ron DeSantis has asked President Joe Biden to confirm whether tennis player Novak Djokovic can travel to Florida by boat so that he can compete in the Miami Open later this month. DeSantis wants to send a ship to the Bahamas to pick up the world’s top-ranked player.
Currently, foreign travelers arriving by airplane to the United States are required to show proof of their vaccination against Covid-19. It is not clear whether the same ban applies to those arriving by sea. The United States is one of the last countries enforcing a travel ban on unvaccinated travelers. Djokovic has refused to take the vaccine. Doing so cost him the opportunity to compete at last year’s U.S. Open, Australian Open, and Miami Open.
It’s a testament to DeSantis’s political acumen, and the Biden administration’s stubbornness, that even in 2023 the governor of Florida keeps finding political opportunities to draw contrasts on resented and unjustifiable Covid-19 restrictions.
To review: U.S. health authorities have long since acknowledged that the Covid vaccines do not stop recipients from transmitting Covid. The vaccines have only a limited ability to stop people from contracting Covid. Recent studies acknowledge that natural immunity is at least as effective in mitigating adverse Covid outcomes as the vaccine. And almost everyone living in the United States has already contracted Covid. All Covid restrictions were initially imposed to save the U.S. health-care system from getting overwhelmed — a danger that passed in 2020. Therefore, no foreign traveler who is unvaccinated against Covid-19 represents a danger to the American people or its health-care system.
It is simply ludicrous that Novak Djokovic, one of the healthiest men on planet Earth — a man who won the Australian Open in January — should be treated like a trachoma-afflicted immigrant applying for entry at Ellis Island. How embarrassing that the United States remains more unjustifiably Covid-paranoid than Australia — land of the two-week involuntary quarantine camps.
As DeSantis wrote in his letter to the president, “the current ‘travel ban’ as applied to Mr. Djokovic — and presumably millions of other potential unvaccinated foreign visitors — seems completely ungrounded in logic, common sense, or any genuine concern for the health and welfare of the American people.”
Keeping up such a ban harms the credibility of the American government, harms American tourism, and even feeds conspiracy theories about the government’s relationship to pharmaceutical companies. DeSantis is right — it’s long past time for it to be ended. Let Djoko in. Let him play. Let any tourist into Miami, and let them spend their money watching him.